Ian Slater: Payback

“Yes,” said Eleanor dishearteningly.

“Can you send me anything you have?”

“Of course,” she assured him, “though some of the gang won’t like it.”

“I’m not politically correct.”

“You have the man on your side on this one.”

“I do? Then send it.”

He’d no sooner put the phone down and entered the bathroom than the phone rang again.

“Douglas,” Margaret called. “A Mr. Aussie Lewis would like to speak with you.”

Mr. Lewis. Freeman smiled at the contrast between Aussie Lewis’s renowned informality and Margaret’s polite form of address.

“Aussie?”

“General. Thought I’d pop around for breakfast first thing tomorrow. Nothing fancy. Coffee and scrambled eggs?”

The general was normally doubtful that the line of an old retiree was being tapped or scanned by terrorist cells, but with National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty having contacted him, and terrorists, courtesy of bin Laden’s millions, equipped with some of the most sophisticated wave-band scanners in the world, he had to be careful and let Aussie know they were not on a scrambler. “No eggs, I’m afraid,” he told Aussie, using the old SALERT phrase for “Be careful, the line could be tapped.”

“Righto. Just coffee’ll do. This product you’re intending to buy from us. Is it domestically produced or an import?”

“What was that?”

“I was saying I thought the product you were interested in is an import.”

“Can you hear me all right?”

“Fine.”

“I’m having trouble hearing you.” Margaret, in the kind of informal move she would never have made before she’d unwittingly signaled to Douglas Freeman that she was in love with him, pointed to the cordless phone the general was holding, whispering, “You can turn up the volume.”

Freeman nodded but didn’t do it. “I’ll give you a call later,” he told Aussie, “from a call box. Have to get this phone seen to.”

“Okay, mate,” Margaret heard Aussie Lewis say. There was nothing wrong with the volume at all — the flat Australian drawl perfectly audible.

Freeman hung up the phone and turned to Margaret. “Thanks, Margaret, but I’m going to make some calls from a public phone.”

Margaret looked surprised.

“Ironically,” he explained, “a public phone is more secure. I know, probably no one’s listening — after all, as far as the Pentagon and the press are concerned, I’m a has-been — but I don’t want to run the risk.” He smiled at her, looking pensive. “On the off chance someone has been watching me, I don’t want you to be in any danger.”

“I’m always careful,” she assured him calmly, but she was reveling in his concern for her, trying not to exaggerate it in her mind as evidence of some deeper feeling he might have for her. She kissed him on the cheek. “Bless you.”

As he left to walk down to the call box by the local 7-Eleven, he saw the blue flickering of TV sets in the houses. It seemed as if everyone was watching the news. Passing by a group of youths drinking and watching a set from a condo balcony he heard “Holy shit!”—the same phrase of alarm and surprise Freeman remembered hearing uttered by a New York fireman witnessing the first hit on the Trade Towers on 9/11.

“Another attack?” Freeman called up to the youths.

“No,” one of them answered. “New footage of the Dallas/Fort Worth hit.”

“Damn!” Freeman said, and hurried to the call box. As he dialed quickly, he wondered whether Aussie had seen it.

He had. “Nasty stuff,” he told the general. “Andra’s rewinding the video now so I can watch it frame by frame.”

“Fine.”

“Andra” was Aussie Lewis’s nickname for his Jewish wife Alexsandra, whom Freeman’s SALERT team had rescued from the JAO — Jewish Autonomous Oblast — region during the U.S.-led U.N. intervention in what was the old far-eastern USSR when Alexsandra had provided vital intelligence. She loved America, her only real irritation being with those who were naive enough to believe that since the fall of the Wall in ’89, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the breakup of the USSR, Putin, et cetera, Russia had forgone its dreams of empire. There were, she knew, anti-American terrorists in Russia. Didn’t her fellow Americans realize that the collapse of the USSR by no means meant the end of Russia’s drive for hegemony in the Far East? In the short run, the Soviet Union did suffer an economic and military disaster. But, as after a terrible fire or a great flood, and after having gotten rid of the nonproductive, parasitic elements, the new Russia, doing as Japan had done after the U.S. bombers had destroyed all her factories, was now building newer state-of-the-art manufacturing plants and a computer infrastructure that would allow Russia to regain her power.

Alexsandra viewed all this with a marked ambivalence. She applauded Russia’s advance, but she feared the terrorists. It was not just the Muslim fanatics, but the old guard, Communist diehards who, temporarily pushed into the background by the surge of economic activity, were patiently waiting to once again seize the reins of power — with, if necessary, the help of terrorists.

Aussie was watching the rewound tape on frame-by-frame advance while listening to Freeman describe the thin, wirelike probe and other features of what he believed had been an Igla 2C missile, which in 4.2 seconds had ended the lives of 375 people in the LAX attack, and which, with the other two missiles fired at JFK and Dallas/Fort Worth, had now shut down every airport in the United States and Canada, stranding millions, and causing so many cancellations — computer banks literally burned out — that two-thirds of the airlines were facing immediate receivership. The impact on the economy, especially on the airline industry and its dependent industries, was as immediate as it had been following 9/11. But insofar as foreign carriers — JAL at LAX and Brazil Air at Dallas/Fort Worth — were involved, the impact on the airline industry worldwide was far more dire than on 9/11. Indeed, it was such that Alan Greenspan’s heir at the Federal Reserve said that to describe the terrorist attacks as having a ripple effect “would be disingenuous, to say the least. Another tsunami,” he said, “has hit the American economy. Every single person in America, from newborn to the most aged, has been directly and catastrophically affected in the financial network that binds this country together, from passengers to subcontractors who provide the important services that a modern aviation industry requires.”

“Is it another Igla?” Freeman pressed Aussie impatiently.

“No, General,” began Aussie, replaying the Dallas/Fort Worth video. “I don’t—”

“Don’t tell me it’s a Stinger?” said Freeman. “One of our own—”

“It’s a Vanguard,” replied Aussie.

“Damn!” said Freeman. It was a Chinese MANPAD. Momentarily he was back in England, early nineties, at the Farnborough Air Show, the biggest and best in Europe. The Chinese were alarming foreign military observers with the claim that their MANPADs were now much faster, their warheads more powerful, their TARSCAP, or target-seeking capability, vastly improved, even against the latest LAIRCOM — Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures — and were also superior, their killing and slant ranges being greater than America’s state-of-the-art Stinger. In particular, Freeman, then only a brigadier general, remembered seeing the face of one of India’s military reps, the wing commander’s eyes widening to saucerlike proportions as he watched the Chinese NORINCO — PLA — industries’ rep and a Pakistani general speak excitedly to each other. The Chinese salesman, eschewing the stereotypical reserve of Chinese officials, had returned the Pakistani’s garrulous, back-slapping bonhomie in full measure. The salesman had obviously sensed, as the CIA later confirmed, a lucrative sale of a Chinese Vanguard shoulder-fired surface-to-air MANPAD.